NUMERICAL SIMULATIONS OF VISCOELASTIC FLOWS IN FIBROUS POROUS MEDIA

摘要

Viscoelastic flow in porous media has important applications in engineering fields such as composite manufacturing, textile coating and chemical enhanced oil recovery industry. The flow resistance of polymeric surfactant in porous system is of great interest. Experimental results indicate a gradually increment dramatic increase of flow resistance above a critical Weissenberg number. However, the steady state numerical simulations show that no evident increase of flow resistance with increasing pure elasticity. Talwar and Khomami simulated creeping flow of shear thinning viscoelastic fluids past periodic regular arrays of fibers with different viscoelastic models and their results indicated that as the pressure drop is progressively increased, the flow resistance decreases initially and then rebounds to its initial value. These discrepancies between their works motivate current numerical study to investigate effects of elasticity, shear-thinning and elongational hardening of a fluid on the flow resistance to the porous system.